I believe I have actually tried most things out there. I settled on Aseprite. Aseprite, to me, is straight better than everything out there, and has a faster development cycle than anything else out there. The only thing other programs have that it doesn't that I'd find myself using are tilemaps. (Pixel art wise. If it got anti-aliased brushes and opacity linked to tablet pressure, I'd use it over a lot of painting software too.)
I found Aseprite to be better than everything when it was free in 2014, and since then it has gotten features faster than all of its primary competition. In short, I feel it's going to eventually get the things it doesn't have, and the pace of its development will leave whatever other programs used to have them exclusively behind.
It very soundly beats the hell out of anything near its price point. Pro Motion may beat it features-wise, but like you, I find using it to be completely contrary to most modern programs.
It doesn't yet compete with beasts like Photoshop or TVPaint, but I genuinely can't imagine using anything else for non tiled pixel art. When I do want tilemaps, I import whatever from Aseprite into Pyxel Edit. Pyxel Edit has better design principles than Pro Motion for tilemaps to me, but it frustratingly can't even do a block copy.
Wouldn't it be great if you could just... get all those tiles in one step? Wouldn't it be great?
Wouldn't it be great?! (This has potentially been fixed by an update by now, but I kind of doubt it? It's the opposite of Aseprite as far as development speed.)
You can totally do that in Pro Motion, but other things about how it handles tiles still make me prefer Pyxel Edit.
To add to your list of programs to try:
JPixel:
https://emad.itch.io/jpixel (I haven't given this one the time it deserves, because it doesn't work on my main computer. If anyone tries it and finds it awesome, please, please report back)
D-Pixel:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14983.340D-Pixel has almost better tile stuff than Pyxel Edit (especially me, who does NES things), but it's missing some key things.
Pyxel Edit is the thing I've liked the most for tilemaps from what I know exists, but I only recommend it because I don't know of anything better rather than thinking it's really good.
I think Aseprite is
really good, but it doesn't do tilemaps. (You can read another "review" I've written about Aseprite at the bottom of
this post on another forum if you click the "Aseprite Love Letter" spoiler.)
For what it's worth, I generally prefer using separate programs that are strong in unique areas, rather than any all in one tool. Even if that weren't true, I would give up the dream of trying to find some program no one has heard of that's
1. Good
with
2. Tilemaps
and
3. Supports Animation.
It's hard enough just to find a program that's good with tilemaps OR animation. If you do have access to Photoshop, you can use smart objects for tilemaps. But I don't use photoshop, so can't give specifics about what that workflow is like.